It can be a challenging process that requires careful planning, effective communication, and a thorough understanding of your worth as a sales professional. We will be discussing the fine art of negotiating commission structures and providing valuable tips for sales professionals to successfully navigate this process.

“The best negotiations occur when both parties walk away feeling like they’ve won.” – Oprah Winfrey

1. Know Your Worth

The first step in negotiating commission structures is understanding your worth as a sales professional. Research and gather data on industry standards, benchmarking data, and your own performance metrics to have a clear understanding of your market value. This information will serve as a solid foundation for your negotiation strategy.

2. Prepare and Plan

Preparation is key in any negotiation process. Gather all relevant data on your sales performance, achievements, and contributions to the company. Prepare a well-organized presentation that highlights your accomplishments and the value you bring to the organization. Consider potential objections or counterarguments from the employer and have compelling responses ready.

3. Focus on Value

When negotiating commission structures, emphasize the value you bring to the company. Highlight how your performance directly impacts the bottom line and contributes to the organization’s success. Clearly articulate how a fair commission structure will incentivize and motivate you to achieve even better results.

4. Be Flexible

While it’s important to have a clear idea of the commission structure you desire, be open to different options or compensation arrangements that may be proposed by the employer. Consider factors such as the company’s financial situation, industry dynamics, and long-term career goals when evaluating different commission structure proposals.

5. Build Relationships

Relationship-building is crucial in any negotiation process. Cultivate positive relationships with key decision-makers in your organization, such as your manager or HR representative. Build trust, establish open lines of communication, and seek feedback to create a conducive environment for negotiations.

6. Be Persistent and Respectful

Negotiations can sometimes be challenging and require persistence. However, it’s important to maintain a professional and respectful demeanour throughout the process. Avoid being confrontational or aggressive, and focus on presenting well-reasoned arguments backed by data and facts. Be persistent in advocating for your worth, but also show a willingness to listen to the employer’s perspective.

7. Consider Long-Term Goals

When negotiating commission structures, consider your long-term career goals and growth prospects within the company. Will the proposed commission structure align with your career aspirations? Does it provide adequate incentives for your performance and contribution? Evaluate the potential impact on your long-term career trajectory before finalizing any commission structure agreement.

8. Stay Informed

Stay well-informed about your company’s policies, compensation guidelines, and industry trends related to commission structures. Research the commission structures offered by competitors or similar companies in your industry to ensure that your negotiation is based on relevant market data.

9. Evaluate and Adjust

Once a commission structure is agreed upon, regularly monitor and evaluate its effectiveness. Assess whether it is driving the desired sales performance and meeting your compensation expectations. If needed, be willing to revisit and make adjustments to the commission structure to ensure it remains fair and competitive.

10. Maintain Professionalism

Regardless of the negotiation outcome, it’s important to maintain professionalism and avoid burning bridges. Stay focused on your sales goals and continue to work with dedication and commitment. Maintain a positive and collaborative relationship with the employer, as it can impact your future opportunities within the company.

“Negotiation is the art of letting go of your ego and focusing on the interests of all parties involved.” – Eleanor Roosevelt, former American first lady

Negotiating commission structures can be a challenging but necessary aspect of a sales professional’s compensation strategy. By knowing your worth, preparing and planning, focusing on value, being flexible, building relationships, being persistent and respectful, considering long-term goals, staying informed, evaluating and adjusting, and maintaining professionalism, you can effectively negotiate commission structures that align with your performance and contribute to your long-term career success.

Remember to approach negotiations with a proactive mindset, backed by research and data, and maintain a professional and respectful demeanour throughout the process. By mastering the fine art of negotiating commission structures, you can ensure that your compensation is fair and competitive while motivating and incentivizing your sales performance.

“Negotiation is the art of achieving your objectives without making enemies.” – Robert Kennedy, American politician and lawyer

“Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” – John F. Kennedy

There are thankfully many different ways to increase your chances of negotiating commission rates that work for both you and your clients. Here are some useful tips for negotiating commission rates:

1. Always do your Research

Before negotiating, it’s crucial to do your research and gather as much information as possible about the market, the competition, and the client’s needs and preferences. This will help you understand the client’s budget and expectations, as well as the industry standards.

2. Set Clear Goals and Expectations

When negotiating commission rates, set clear goals and expectations for both parties. This means defining the project, the timelines, and the payment terms. You should also clarify the structure, including the percentage, the calculation method, and the payment frequency. Setting clear goals and expectations can help build trust and prevent any misunderstandings in the future.

3. Showcase your Value Proposition

To negotiate higher commission rates, you need to showcase your value proposition and demonstrate how you can help the client achieve their goals and solve their problems. This means highlighting your experience, skills, and track record of success in similar projects or industries. You should also focus on the benefits that the client will get from working with you, such as increased sales, better customer satisfaction, or improved brand reputation.

4. Use the Power of Persuasion

Negotiating commission rates is not only about presenting your case but also about using the power of persuasion to convince the other party that you are the best fit for the job. This means using persuasive language, active listening, and empathy to understand the client’s concerns and objections and address them effectively.

5. Be Flexible and Creative

Sometimes, the client’s budget or constraints may not allow you to negotiate the commission rates you want. It is always important to be flexible and creative in finding alternative solutions that work for both parties. One way is to propose a performance-based commission structure, where your commission rate increases as you reach certain sales milestones.

6. Prepare for Objections

When negotiating commission rates, you should prepare for objections and be ready to address them effectively. Some common objections include the client’s budget constraints, their preference for a different commission structure, or their perception of your value proposition. Overcome these objections simply by actively listening, acknowledging their concerns, and providing evidence to support your position.

“You must never try to make all the money that’s in a deal. Let the other fellow make some money too because if you have a reputation for always making all the money, you won’t have many deals.” – J. Paul Getty

Negotiating commission rates in business requires a combination of research, preparation, persuasion, and flexibility. By following these tips and strategies, you can increase your chances of getting favorable commission rates that work for both you and your clients.

Remember to set clear goals and expectations, leave your feelings out of the negotiation, showcase your value proposition, use the power of persuasion, be flexible and creative, and prepare for objections. With practice and experience, you can become a skilled negotiator who can win deals and build successful partnerships that will benefit your business in the long run.

“The single and most dangerous word to be spoken in business is no. The second most dangerous word is yes. It is possible to avoid saying either.” – Lois Wyse

RevOps within digital marketing is on the rise – rapidly becoming an established norm when it comes to internal operational management. What exactly is meant by RevOps? A contraction of “Revenue Optimisation” this term refers to an operational model designed to ensure that a business’s capacity for revenue generation is maximized. As ever, our integration partner HubSpot has some excellent resources to help you learn more about this model.

A RevOps approach seeks to instill full cooperative alignment between alignment of marketing, sales, and customer service teams. Rather than operating in isolation, before passing off a lead or established customer to the care of a separate team acting in isolation, a “flywheel” model is established. All teams work in closer collaboration, with a focus on end-to-end customer experience, seamless workflows and integrated systems. This removes friction and supercharges a business’s ability to scale.

In the case of digital marketing agencies, the benefits of an active RevOps strategy are twofold – better internal agency collaboration and outcomes, at the same time as improving client satisfaction and success. Within this article, we’ll outline some of the ways in which RevOps looks set to improve the landscape for digital marketing agencies today, and in the years to come.

RevOps For Digital Marketing Agency Internal Alignment 

RevOps can be implemented to help to bring a digital marketing agency into better internal alignment. Within the traditional RevOps model, accountability stops becoming a siloed practice. Instead, your account managers and support team gain better “full picture” insight into client success, measured across a wider range of metrics and markers.

The cyclical RevOps model means that this improved insight feeds back into sharper, more accurate marketing recommendations for clients. In turn, this helps to build up a more holistic understanding of the way that different agency teams collaborate and depend on each other’s outcomes.

For example, marketing team members learn about common pain points and blockers from the sales team, and are able to incorporate this into their own planning going forward.

Improved Digital Marketing Sales Attribution 

Knowing exactly where your success is coming from is essential within the setting of a digital marketing agency. By helping bring clarity to a dynamic process that relies upon the input of many different teams and individuals, RevOps can help improve attribution when it comes to sales success.

Everyone working towards your clients’ success will have a better idea of what’s working in the context of “the bigger picture.” This does more than simply helping you work out more productive, collaborative workflows – it can also have a really positive impact upon  team cohesion and motivation.

Digital marketing agencies are always on the lookout for ways to improve their marketing sales commission structure – by making it more efficient, more commercially appealing – or, most probably, all of the above! By adopting a RevOps model, you can apply the deeper insight gained into the roles that everyone played towards a closed deal, and translate this into a fairer compensation structure.

Multistage commission is a great way of ensuring that everyone involved in a deal is getting fair payment for their contribution, in a timely fashion. Commissionly’s multistage commission feature enables you to pay commissions at different stages of your sales and delivery process to different payees – keeping your teams motivated with well-timed, fair compensation for their input.

Enhanced Client Experiences 

The RevOps model is increasingly commonplace across a wide variety of client or customer based businesses. As a result, by adopting these principals internally, you’ll be able to “speak the same language” as your clients, who are more than likely very familiar with the benefits of such a model, and putting them into practice within their own businesses.

This helps to build trust and increase the likelihood of cross selling and upselling, as you gain a better understanding of their pain points and business models – and, perhaps most importantly, see how your input as an agency sits within their wider business model. An active RevOps strategy also helps to demonstrate your interest and commitment to your clients’ end results, through better account expansion and improved customer-focused campaigns.

Once established, a RevOps model just gets better over time. Thanks to its cyclical “flywheel” structure, improvements feed back into the start of the process. Client experience is improved in a way that is consistently demonstrated over time – no quick fixes or emergency measures – just a great, holistic agency experience.

Eliminated Tech Silos 

The smart leverage of data is essential to success within a digital marketing agency environment. With the rise of MarTech, this is becoming increasingly essential, as a wide variety of tools give us insight into our campaign and client success metrics.

By combining marketing and customer success data, RevOps enables you to see which campaigns are resonating at the same time as highlighting the elements of your marketing mix that are having the greatest impact in terms of the outcomes clients are looking for.

As an agency, you can leverage this insight to improve post-purchase marketing experiences (i.e. offering your clients more than just lead generation or traffic.) Data can be put to use shortening purchase cycles and accelerating sales. Commissionly is a great example of a solution that can help to power a strong RevOps strategy, allowing easy integration with a huge range of CRMs to ensure that you’re able to easily join the dots between client success and team commissions.

Improved Agency Success Metrics

Finally, let’s not forget the tangible lift that RevOps can bring to a business in terms of success metrics. In 2020, the Boston Consulting Group found that B2B companies implementing RevOps accelerated their revenue growth and operations efficiency with a

• 100% – 200% increase in digital marketing ROI
• 10% – 20% increase in sales productivity
• 10% increase in lead acceptance
• 15% – 20% increase in customer satisfaction
• 30% reduction in expenses

This is especially important and relevant within a digital marketing agency context, where businesses are typically looking for long-term, steady accounts that are retained with minimal effort, allowing for customer relationships that continue to grow and strengthen over time.

RevOps For Digital Marketing Agencies: Get Ahead

RevOps represents a real opportunity for digital marketing agencies to improve outcomes and streamline their internal processes. More effective interdepartmental communication leads to better collaboration and attribution of success.

By pairing a solution like Commissionly alongside the RevOps approach, you can ensure that all effort is appropriately rewarded, showing your respect and appreciation for multiple agency teams, pulling together to help bring your business great results.

With a focus on streamlining customer experience, and allowing for better personalisation at every stage of their journey, it’s no surprise that RevOps is increasingly being heralded as the secret to account-based business success. Digital marketing agencies have so much to gain from his model – especially when it comes to marketing sales commission structure, and motivating a commission-based workforce to see the bigger picture within an agency environment.  

Looking to kick sales up a gear? 5 Tips For A Highly Motivated Marketing Sales Team – See our next blog …

Payment processing. As an industry, we know better than most the power of a smooth-flowing, friction-free process. We go to the greatest lengths to ensure that our payment processing strategy is fully optimized, delivering the very best results and experience to merchants and their customers, sidestepping fraud and delivering a wide range of payment options.

When it comes to the internal management of our payment processing commissions process, a little care and attention can, similarly, go a long way. When we focus on improving efficiency within our payment processing commissions workflows, we create a ripple effect that triggers benefits throughout our wider business.

In this short guide, we’ll take you through four of the core ways that you can take a proactive approach to streamlining your payment processing commissions, to improve key outcomes and avoid some common payment processing commission pitfalls. Ready to see some real improvements? Read on…

1. Automate Your Terminal Sales And Transaction Commissions 

In recent years, automation has had a transformative effect on just about any industry you care to name -– and when it comes to managing your payment processing commissions, it represents a significant opportunity.

Let’s start by considering the alternative. Manually tracking your terminal sales and transaction commissions in a non-automated system is time consuming at best. At worst, it’s inaccurate and limiting, especially in terms of your ability to dependably scale. For some businesses, spreadsheets may have proven an adequate tool for commission management up until a certain point – but the scales are easily tipped, and if growth is to be welcomed and easily accommodated, their ability to keep pace with the demands of real acceleration is dubious.

Automation brings the added advantage of drastically reducing the margin for human error within your system, pulling through data points with perfect accuracy, with no lag time or margin for misinterpretation. Working with a system that enables this kind of data handling means you’re going to gain more clarity, and this can be translated into better agency transparency, giving a more accurate and realistic overview of performance and helping to forecast future success on their part.

In terms of the elements of your payment processing commissions that can be processed, look for a solution that enables agent mapping (meaning that the correct sales and transactions will be automatically allocated to the agent responsible) and clawbacks (for easy and accurate remuneration, if a merchant churns.)

Make It Happen

Commissionly is a commission management platform that enables full automation. In terms of its specific suitability for the payment processing sector, you’ll be able to implement ​​manager, agent and sub agent commission hierarchies with ease. Splits between agents in terms of transaction report commissions can also be handled automatically by the platform.

2. Integrate Your CRM  

Knowledge is power – and this is especially true when it comes to the easy interpretation of the data that your commission management systems generate. In order to ensure that you’re getting the most actionable insights from your payment processing commission data, it’s important to avoid silos. The answer? Smart integrations that link your solutions and ensure that information can flow freely, giving you the clarity you need to make progress and improvements.

Integrating your CRM into your commission management solution carries a whole range of benefits. For a start, you’ll gain much better visibility of any emergent trends and patterns – helping you to act swiftly to amplify any positive impact. Conversely, you’ll also be more likely to receive an “early alert” to any developing issues, giving you a chance to take evasive action. Better access to data also means better future forecasting (as previously mentioned, a big benefit when it comes to building up trust and retention amongst your agents.)

Overall, a dependably integrated CRM will enable you to be more operationally efficient, with instant access to to precise stats and data, as and when you need it – all updated in real time with no need for manual input, and guaranteed accuracy.

Make It Happen

Commissionly is designed to integrate perfectly with a wide range CRMs, from Salesforce and Freshsales through to Excel and Google Sheets. So, however you currently manage your CRM data, you’ll be able to rely upon a boost to the clarity and practical insights you’re able to achieve. 

Learn more about how Commissionly is adapted to serve the Payment Processing industry  

3. Formalise Your Reporting Cadence 

Another big benefit that you can bring into play when looking to streamline your payment processing commissions is a more formalised reporting cadence. With easier access to your data, there are many benefits to be gained by scheduling more regular reporting. Having standardised “check in points” helps refine your performance assessment and the adjustment of your forecasts and ongoing strategy.

Time won back via automation can be better leveraged here, as you are released from the tedium of manual input and instead can focus on the areas of your process that would benefit from attention. This is where real strategic improvements can start to be seen – helping drive better revenue outcomes and ensuring that your commission management solution is earning you a great return on investment. 

Make It Happen

Commissionly is designed to make it easy to produce detailed transaction reports for your payment processing commissions. Parameters are fully customisable, and we offer a wide range of custom templates to suit all processors and help with flawless data import and help you identify patterns with ease and confidence.

4. Invest In Your Agents 

Finally, let’s unpack the final piece of the puzzle – the impact that your agents have upon the efficiency and impact of your payment processing operation. Agents’ experience has a big part to play in terms of contributing to your operational effectiveness and efficiency. Their success and performance depends on more than initial onboarding and training, and yet for many operations, this is typically the extent of the investment they’ll experience.

There’s a need to establish loyalty – and as with any commission based model, this depends upon their faith in the opportunity you represent for them. 

Make It Happen

Commissionly gives you the opportunity to actively improve your agent relationships – with time won back through automation, and better insight obtained through improved reporting and integrations. Build a reputation to be proud of, reducing the burden of acquisition, reducing agent churn and building a reliable and experienced network to help your business grow from strength to strength.

Conclusion

With the rapid and ongoing acceleration of digital payments, the payment processing industry looks set to experience many opportunities and challenges in the year that lies ahead. The providers who thrive will be those with the bandwidth to adapt and evolve alongside the industry – not those who are still hindered by manual process and endless, error-prone spreadsheets.

With greater clarity (from easier access to more reliable data) and more time (saved via smart automations) to invest in their agent retention, the providers relying on Commissionly to streamline their Payment Processing Commissions can expect to drive real operational improvements. 

Book a demo to learn more about the ways that Commissionly can bring efficiency and accuracy to your payment processing commission management.